How to Position Your Product Right w/ April Dunford, Author of Obviously Awesome

Hey everybody, this is Mike Balsito, co-founder of Product Collective, and we are back for another industry interview. For those of you that are just joining the session now, welcome. We're just getting started here. I know Zoom is allowing everybody in sort of one by one, so thank you very much for, for joining us. I'm excited about today's session. We actually tried to have this session right before the end of the year in 2019 and those darn technical issues.

You know, it was an attempt. It was a good solid attempt. We all got on, we were ready to go, but it's led us to this new platform, Zoom webinars, and we've been, we've been enjoying it. That's positive thinking.

You know, I like to think, I like to think positive. So, um, yeah, before we get into today's session, for those of you that are attending for the very first time, Welcome to the Industry Interviews. You know, these are live video Q&A chats that we have with product leaders. We do these twice a month, so usually on the first and third Wednesday of every month at 1 PM Eastern. And, you know, they're conversations that we have on specific topics, and, you know, I'm asking a lot of questions to our guests, but really, you know, this is a chance for you to get to ask questions to our guests as well. So I want to just, for those of you that are joining us for the first time, There are a couple features at the bottom I want to point out. There's the chat, and that, you know, it's a great place to sort of share where you're from, what product you're working on. In fact, go ahead and do that. For some of you that are, that are here, maybe in the chat you can share that because it's fun to see where people are from all over the world, and it'll give me a chance to know that you can see and hear me okay, which is always important. But there's also a Q&A section at the bottom. This is the place that if you have questions for our guests at any time, enter it in the Q&A section. Try not to do it in the chat, try to put in the Q&A. I'll be monitoring that throughout and I'll be pulling in questions from the audience. So I have questions to get started with, but I'd love to get to your questions as well. So, you know, aside from these industry interviews at Product Collective, we have a whole host of other ways that we're trying to help product people all year round. We have a newsletter that goes out to about 30,000 people every week. We have an active Slack channel. I think there's about 10,000 people in the Slack community. And then in person, we meet at a conference called Industry. We organize Industry, the product conference. It happens every spring in Dublin, Ireland. In fact, it's almost 5 weeks away, a little less than 5 weeks away. And our guest is one of the keynote speakers there as well. And I'll get to her in just a second. That is coming up. So, and then in the fall, we gather in Cleveland, Ohio, and there should be about 1,400 people with us in Cleveland this year. So, it keeps getting bigger and bigger. If you want to check out information on that, you can go to industryconference.com and you could see the details there. But I would love to get to our guest who today is April Dunford. April is the CEO of Ambient Strategy, also author of the book called Obviously Awesome, who I was telling this book about to somebody and they're like, yeah, I know it's, I'm sure it's awesome, but what is the title? And I'm like, no, it's obviously awesome. I'm trying to tell you. But April, thanks a lot for joining us.

I'm so happy to be here. I'm glad we're doing this. I'm excited.

I'm excited too. I'm really excited. You know, you spoke at Industry in Cleveland and obviously we're bringing you with us to Dublin, Ireland. So that's going to be a lot of fun.

I'm super excited. I can't wait. It's coming up so fast, like 5, 6 weeks.

It definitely is. It definitely is. But for people that couldn't, maybe they weren't in Cleveland or they couldn't, they can't make it to Dublin coming up. I thought this would be a great time to get together with you and we could talk a little bit about, well, really it's the topic of your book, right? Positioning.

Yeah. Yeah. Positioning is my jam.

Well, maybe we could get started with maybe the simplest question, or actually maybe it's like the question where you could go on all day about, but like what, to a product person, like what is positioning? Like what should product people be thinking about when it comes to positioning?

Yeah. So positioning, like part of the reason I wrote the book is that, you know, it's such a fundamental concept, positioning, and yet it is so tragically misunderstood. So when I talk about positioning, I usually have to start by talking about what positioning is not. So it is not a tagline, it's not the same thing as messaging, it's not— I get really mad when people talk about brand positioning because there's branding and there's positioning, and these two things are completely different. In fact, most of the things that people confuse positioning with, they're outputs, that they're things that you do after positioning, but they aren't actually positioning itself. So My definition of positioning is that positioning defines how your product is uniquely qualified or the best in the world at providing something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about. So that's a mouthful. It encompasses a lot of things. It basically defines who's my competition, what are the capabilities I have that my competition does not have, what is the value that my product delivers, uh, Who are my ideal customers for this product? And at a macro level, what's the market category that I intend to win or that I am positioning this product within?

I love that. That's a— so that's a great start. I think as for product people, like, we want to get a good base understanding of it. But I imagine for, you know, we had you at the conference and you were one of the highest rated speakers. Actually, I think this Last year you were the highest rated speaker that we had. Number one, which is awesome, right? And it's so, it's completely relevant to product people. But I sometimes, or at least, you know, going back to my business school days, sometimes positioning got associated with marketing. But I, as a product person, I do think it's completely relevant. What if people were to ask you, well, wait, isn't that a marketing thing? Like, what would you say to them?

Yeah. So, so this is, this is like This is a big thing too. Like, I have these conversations a lot where people will say, well, hang on, who owns positioning? And that's a bit like saying who owns business strategy? Like, if I woke up tomorrow as, let's say I'm the head of marketing, and I woke up tomorrow and I said, you know what, we keep saying we're email, but I think we're chat. So we're chat now. And I'm gonna make that decision. Like, no way, the CEO would come and fire me, right? Similarly, If I was the head of product or even the head of product marketing and I were to come out and say, you know what, I, you know, I think we need to shift this positioning and we're, you know, we're no longer competing with Salesforce. I think we actually compete with, you know, Wistia and, you know, and then I couldn't make that decision on my own. No one department owns it. But here's the thing. If your positioning is weak, it is gonna show up in a handful of ways. It's gonna show up in people comparing you to the wrong competitors and saying, hey, I think you're like Salesforce. And you're like, oh gosh, we're not like Salesforce. Why does everybody think we're like Salesforce and we're not? Or it's gonna show up in people saying, oh, I think your product is this. So I'm gonna go ahead and sign up for a trial. And then I get in there and oh no, it doesn't do the thing I thought it did. And so I'm gonna drop out of the trial. Worse, I'm gonna actually sign up for the product, buy it, get in, and then when it comes time to renewal, I'm like, this thing didn't do what I thought it was gonna do, this isn't what I thought it was, and then they drop out. So even though product doesn't own positioning, marketing doesn't own positioning, are they gonna be the early warning people? Are they gonna feel the impact if the positioning is weak early? Yeah, they are. And in a lot of the organizations that I've worked in, product in particular, and product marketing if we want to get super specific, is tasked with understanding the landscape that is going to impact what your positioning is all about. So who exactly are we competing with and how is that shifting over time? And what are our big— what is our big differentiating value? And is it still as differentiating as it was 6 months ago or a year ago? And so It's one of these hard ones. Like, it's, it's, you are often in product the person that's spearheading an effort to get clarity on the positioning, but you don't get to own it. Like, it is an executive team decision across everything in the company. Sales has got to be on board. Customer success has got to be on board. Certainly your executive team, marketing, and everybody's got to be on board, but it quite often falls to product. To kind of drive an effort to fix it if it's busted because it's holding product back in all the things that they have to go do.

You mentioned something that stood out to me, um, when you're talking about, well, one, you know, 6 months, 9 months. So to me, I'm thinking that product positioning, it's sounding like this isn't something that we should look at as like, oh, let's do a positioning exercise and now this is set.

This is—

sounds like it's probably like this is an evolution, like this is a continual process that I don't know any process, but like we should be thinking about positioning constantly. Is that true? Or what's your take on that?

That's totally true. So, you know, if you think about it again, if we come back to the definition, right, we're talking about who our competitors are and how we're different and what our unique value is and therefore what market do we compete in. None of those things are static. So, you know, your positioning exists in a system, but the system is always changing. So, you know, your competitors are changing, their products are changing, they're getting new capabilities. In some cases, they're doing acquisitions, they're moving in and out of markets. At the same time, the actual— your customers are changing and their attitudes about things are changing. And often that will have a big impact on your positioning. Like, I worked for a company where our positioning was all around helping mid-sized businesses make more revenue. And so our positioning was really around that. And then the great financial crisis hit and everybody switched from being really worried about making more revenue to being really worried about controlling costs. So we had to make this big switch on account of that. You've seen outside things like Government regulations like GDPR, things like that, can actually impact how a company's positioning. So your competitors are changing, your market's changing, your own product is changing. So you're getting new capabilities, there's new things that your product can do, and often all that stuff together can result in, you know, positioning that used to work doesn't work anymore. So you need to have to be constantly checking in on it. You can't just set it and forget it. Now, that said, I've had products I've worked on. I was just having a conversation last week with some folks, and I was talking about a product I worked on. It was my first product I ever repositioned 22 years ago. And while we were having the conversation, it's now owned by SAP. So we flipped up the page in SAP And that positioning has barely changed. Like 22 years later, that thing's like an almost a billion-dollar product line. And it hasn't changed. There it is. The same, practically the same words. They're talking a little bit about, you know, Internet of Things, 'cause that's trendy. And before we were talking about mobile, but basically the same thing. Whereas I have other companies I've worked with, like I had one where we had this great positioning, but it was, It was really reliant on us positioning with and in contrast to MySQL. And then they got acquired by Sun, and it's 6 months later. So we had to blow up the positioning and redo it all again. But then we had this cool thing going on with Sun. So we did some neat positioning with Sun and we were all happy with that. That was good for about 8 months. And then Sun got acquired by Oracle and Oracle made a lot of really negative noises about what they were going to do with MySQL. And we're like, okay, well that's out the window. Threw that one out the window. So in that one, we repositioned it 3 times. Times in less than 2 years. So it's hard to predict how long your positioning is going to last.

Yeah. Well, I'm going to— to reward people that are asking early questions, I'm going to, I'm going to actually take an audience question now and remind everybody to keep those questions coming in because I want to get some more of these. But somebody was curious about whether or not positioning should be thought of like, is it purely, you know, higher level for our products or the business? Or what about even like to a product person, like at an individual feature level.

Yeah. You know, it's funny. Yeah. You can't, you can do positioning around features. Like, it's interesting. Like in my, in my thinking of this, you know, you've got in many, if you're a multi-product company, like let's say we're like IBM or something. In fact, this was true when I worked at IBM. At IBM, we had positioning at so many different levels. So when we pitched you a product, we would start with the IBM positioning. This is why you wanna work with IBM. And then I was in Software Group, and then we'd say, this is why you wanna deal with Software Group, you know, and this is what all the stuff we do at Software Group and why it's good to be a part of that ecosystem. And then within that, we were in the data management division. So we'd say, here's why you wanna buy databases from IBM. And then I had my thing, which wasn't even a database, like inside the division. So I go, IBM Software Group, Database Division, database thingy I was selling. And then if we had a new release, we would have positioning around the jazzy new feature in the jazzy new release. So you can get all the way down to positioning a particular feature. But what's important is that you understand the hierarchy of it. Like, it would be, in my opinion, likely confusing to customers to try to do that positioning the other way around and say, I got a feature and it lives in a product that lives in a division that lives in a thing that lives in, you know, and then all the way up to IBM. I think you do have to actually start with the bigger one and go down and then decide how far down do I need to go to really make the case to get you hooked to buy this thing. And if you got to get all the way down to the individual features, do it. Like, your product positioning is going to talk about value props and then you're going to talk about features that enable that value. But sometimes you've got a really sparkly new jazzy thing that's super differentiating. It's the cornerstone to your actual product positioning. So you want to get it right front and center and talk about it there. It kind of depends on the actual product and where you're at and what you're doing.

You know, I'm curious, what mistakes do you see? And I'm sure you see a ton of them, but you know, when it comes to positioning, where do people usually go wrong?

Not just seen them, man, done them.

I make mistakes all the time too.

So yeah, so there's a, there's also, I'll tell you the most common mistake, which, yeah, and I fell into this trap. Like even after I recognized that this was the most common mistake, I would still catch myself falling into this trap all the time. Most common mistake is we fall into kind of this, what I would call default positioning. And what that is, is, you know, most products were developed with an idea of making an existing thing better. So we say, hey man, email sucks. Well, let's make better email. Or, you know, databases. I just spent a lot of time in databases. Databases are terrible. Let's make a better database. Or email's terrible. Let's make better email. And then, you know, we put the thing out there, customers love things, they don't love things, we're iterating on it. At the same time, all this market stuff is happening. Market's changing, customers are changing, things are changing. And we get to this point where we are just so stuck in this idea of what it is, we can't even see that there are other alternative ways to position it. That would make the thing, that would make the value of the product we're trying to sell much more obvious. But we're stuck in this kind of default. You know, we're like, it's email. What else could it be? It's email. We're email people and we make email and that's it. We can't think of it any other way. But meanwhile, you know, customers are looking at it going, I don't know, man, it's kind of, it seems like chat. I don't think it is email, you know? And then they're all confused. They don't understand. And you're like, no, we don't compete with Gmail. And you're like, you don't? Cause you said you were email. I don't get it. And so this, So just falling into this trap of, you know, this is what we've always been, this is what we are, we couldn't possibly be anything else. That's the biggest mistake I see people make.

Yeah. I'm going to go to another audience question. And this person, the question is more around how to share the positioning within an organization. Like once something, once you sort of figure out what your product positioning is, you know, how do you usually share that with all the stakeholders within the company? Is there some sort of artifacts that works well? Like, yeah, that's what's that like?

Question. What a great question. So yeah, so, so here I have this, a two-part answer. So one thing is coming back to my earlier thing about, you know, marketing or product, or I don't care what department you are, you cannot own positioning. It needs to actually be done to, you know, together with the, with all the big departments of the company. So essentially the executive team needs to come together and agree on what the positioning is. So that's the first step. Like, in the— like, I'm a consultant now and I do positioning stuff, but in the work I do, if the companies can't agree to getting everybody in the room, we're not even gonna do it. Because if I'm trying to do positioning and we don't have sales in the room and sales doesn't get it, it's pointless. Yeah, we'll come up with some beautiful positioning, but it ain't never gonna stick because I need everybody, heads of all the groups, I need everybody to say yep, I get it, I got it, I make sense, it makes sense, I buy in, let's go. Now, how we actually capture that is there's two ways that I've done it that I think work. There's lots of ways I've done it that don't work. You know what doesn't work? A positioning statement. This does not work.

That's like a Mad Libs style kind of old school way, right?

It's like this fill in the blanks thing and I'm just going to write a sentence. There's not enough detail. Nobody knows how you got to where you got to. Nobody's going to look at that thing. It's not actionable enough to share around with people. Like, people write these things, they go in the drawer, they never come out. Do not do that. It's a waste of time. I've done tons of them. Waste of time. Nobody ever looks at them. There's two ways to do it. One, um, yeah, I like the idea of a positioning document. But sometimes I've seen people do this in a positioning canvas, and— but in my opinion, the positioning document is usually needed because you need a bit of detail. So you can do the canvas, but you're still going to have to have the document to get into some of the gory detail. So, and in that document, you are essentially documenting, here's where our actual competitors are and why. These are our differentiated features and capabilities, big list of them, and, and usually clumped into categories. The third thing is these are how these features translate into value and get assigned to value buckets. So we have value bucket number 1, here's the features that sit under that value bucket. Number 2, here's the feature. Value bucket number 3, here's the features. And then when we have that, then the next section is Therefore, these are our best fit target customers, or the characteristics of a best fit target customer, meaning this is what makes a target customer really, really, really care a lot about the value we just discussed in the value section. So here's what— it's essentially customer segmentation. So you want to capture that. And then the last bit is, therefore, this is the market category we position ourselves in and exactly the way we phrase that. So you can do it on a canvas, and I have an example of one that I use in my book. And, you know, if you email me, I can send you the templates. And it's like a one-pager that's like, here's the category, here's the competitive alternatives, and then it kind of lines up capabilities Or sorry, and then it's, here's the target segment, the people that care a lot, and this is how we do this mapping between competitors' differentiated features and value. I kind of prefer doing the document though, because I find if it isn't enough meat on it, then, you know, you go give it to the marketing department, but they're gonna be like, there's just not enough here. And that's partly why the sentence doesn't work, like the positioning statement.

Yeah, and by the way, everybody, I'm going to email, um, everybody, so those that are watching now but also those that weren't able to attend, and I'm going to send you a link to April's website because I, I read a lot of posts that you've written on the topic too, right from your website. Um, and it'll— there'll be information on the book too, so that would be helpful as well.

Yep.

Um, I want to go to another audience question. So this question came up, but I'm going to actually add on to it a little bit. This question was You know, what about internal products? And maybe I'll add on, like, you know, when we think of, uh, everybody's, you know, working on their own thing, maybe somebody's B2B versus B2C. Like, those are two totally different types of products too. Like, should we be thinking about this the same no matter what kind of product we're working on, or does it really depend on the product?

Well, I'm going to give you like my, my super caveated response to that. So, um, so my background's all B2B. Um, and, and most of the work I've done has been around positioning B2B products. I've done some B2C stuff, but most of the B2C stuff that I've worked on is where the price is a little bit higher and it's a really considered purchase. So, you know, it's B2C, but they act a bit like more like B2B, you know, we're buying a car versus buying toothpaste. But so with that as the caveat, all my stuff has really been oriented around that. And so outside of that, I'm just giving you my opinion, and it might be, it might be bad advice. So, but in my opinion, the only difference between B2B and B2C is in B2B, particularly where you have a salesperson, there is much better institutional knowledge around what the customer was using before they adopted your product. What was the event that happened that made them think about, hey, we need to do something different. What were the competitors they considered and why did they buy your thing? In B2B where there are salespeople involved, we can get that information. In B2C, that information often does not exist without the company specifically going to get it. So the positioning is a lot more difficult to do because they don't have the raw material to do it. So that's the big thing. When I think about internal products, here's the thing. I think anywhere that you are selling, and I use sales in the broad term here, right? Like I might be influencing you and there might not be money changing hands, but I got to sell you on something, then you are definitely doing positioning whether you like it or not. And so do I think internal products need to be positioned? Oh, hell yeah. Particularly if, you know, there's a chance they're not, they're not going to get adopted because people don't understand it. And people are like, why do we even have this thing? And what should I be doing with it? Like a positioning exercise, I think is important to do on internal products in the same way it is on external products because if people don't get it. They're not going to have the right expectations around it. And it's just not going to get adopted.

I think that's great. And so I have, I mean, we're kind of getting close to the end of our time. So maybe just sort of my final question. And then I do want to, you know, ask you, or at least you could share where people could keep tabs on your work too. But as my final question, for people that are hearing this, and they're liking it, and they're like, all right, I want to start to get my hands dirty, like, what do you recommend to get started? I personally think one good step would be to grab a copy of your book, obviously awesome. I think that would be a good starting point, which by the way, if people were attending Industry in Dublin, they're gonna get one because we're getting copies for every attendee there. But what— so there's that. What else? What other recommendations would you have for people to get started?

Yeah, so, you know, the, the, the big book on positioning is this— I'm looking around because I probably got a copy of it. I used to have a copy sitting right here and now it's gone. But anyways, there's a book, there's the book that I read, the book. If you go to marketing school and they teach you positioning, you read this book called Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. And these are the guys that came up with the concept of positioning. It's really old. It was written in 1982. The The examples are super, super dated, like they will literally make you laugh out loud because they'll be talking about Crystal Pepsi and mysterious products like this that nobody even remembers anymore. But as a primer on what positioning is, what it's all about, like just to get your head around the concept, I still think it is a very, very, very good book to read. The problem with that book is it doesn't give you one little clue how to actually get it done. Which is the thing that drove me crazy about that book. You know, like I talk to marketers now and sometimes we get into this conversation about content marketing. Like if you think content marketing is a new thing, let me tell you, these guys, Reason Trout, were doing that in 1982. Like you buy this book, you get all excited and then you're like, okay, what do I do? And then it was like, call us. So that made me mad. So my book is a good companion book for that one. Like, you could just start with mine if, you know, if— and see if that's enough. It probably is. But my book is more oriented around, you know, you're trying to actually do this stuff and you want to figure out a methodology for getting it done. And yeah, concepts are nice, but you actually live in the real world where stuff's got to happen. And mine's more sort of a how-to kind of here's the methodology, here's how you're going to work through it.

Which I love the how-to, like that's what I'm always looking for is like, all right, cool, but I want to get started, like what do I do?

So yeah, like we're not like— it's nice, but we're not all marketing professors, like we're not all sitting here thinking our deep marketing thoughts. We need to actually sell some stuff, man.

We need to do the things. Um, well, this is, this is awesome. The time flies by as always, but There's a lot of questions I didn't get to. Maybe you could share with folks, like, I know you're active on Twitter, you have your website. Would you mind sharing?

Yeah, Twitter. It's like, I'm probably the most active, like, in terms of social media, I'm probably the most active on Twitter. So I'm @AprilDunford. You can find me there. And then yeah, I have a website. It's AprilDunford.com. There's the templates for the book are there. And there's some— I'm a very occasional blogger, but every once in a while I get in a real blogging motion and I write a bunch of stuff. I'm working on some videos. You heard it here first. Ooh. And so when these videos come out, this is going to be like positioning school in video. It's going to be good. But don't hold your breath too much for that. But that's coming at some point. And, and yeah, there's the book. And then the only new thing I have to say about the book is I just recorded the audiobook. So the audiobook is— I submitted it to Audible. The files are in there and it's just making its way through the approval process. So if you're more into audiobooks, give it a week or so and it should be out there. If you follow me on Twitter, I'll be freaking out about it on Twitter. So that's when I'll tell you that it's coming. But yeah, that's coming soon too. I'm excited about that.

Awesome. Well, I'm excited too now. So I will, I will be keeping tabs on that. And yeah, thank you for being here, April. I really appreciate it.

I'm looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks. And thanks everybody for coming. And I'm sorry we didn't get to all your questions, but you can tweet me or something, and when I'm sitting in the airport later, I'll see if I can answer them.

Definitely do that, everybody. And yeah, thank you for attending, and hopefully we'll see y'all soon on a future industry interview. So have a good rest of the day, everybody.